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Following on from my previous blogs this post will examine the value of information in relation to business intelligence.

According to Laudon & Laudon (2012), business intelligence is a term used by IT consultants and hardware and software vendors to describe the “the infrastructure for warehousing, integrating , reporting, and analyzing data that comes from the business environment”. It is this infrastructure that “collects, stores , cleans and makes relevant information available to managers”. This process can be compared to the 6th ‘r’ of information management ,restructuring(Rowley and Farrow,2000), as mentioned by my colleague ‘sad111408878’ in their post on 11/2/13.

The largest providers of business intelligence and analytic products are SAP, Oracle, IBM, SAS Institute, and Microsoft. Hallmark Cards is an example of a company that uses SAS Analytics software (SAS Institute has 15% of the market share among the previously mentioned top business intelligence vendors) in order to improve its relationship with loyal customers. Through the utilization of data mining and predictive modelling Hallmark is able to identify what the most effective communication medium for each customer segment is .i.e whether to use direct mail or email, and what specific messages to send to each group. In contrast to organisations like Lehman Brothers as mentioned in my previous post, Hallmark has successfully utilized information that meets the criteria that characterises high quality information as discussed in my first post on 7/2/13. Use of business intelligence and analytical products has provided Hallmark cards with relevant information that has resulted in a 5-10% increase in sales to its loyalty program members(Laudon & Laudon, 2012).

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5 Responses to “Business intelligence”

Very interesting blog. You mentioned the Lehman Brothers in the above blog. If you have any additional information on how the value of information was key to their operation it would be very much appreciated as I am very interested in the Lehman Brothers.

Thank you ‘sad111490988’. As mentioned above I initially discussed the Lehman brothers example in more depth in a previous blog on 7/2/13. However if that information is insufficient I would recommend that you refer to Chapter 12 of the Laudon & Laudon book that I referenced in that particular blog. If you have any further queries please don’t hesitate to contact me. I would be more than happy to be of assistance.🙂